Quote Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger View Post
Of course both sides ingratiated themselves to the Germans. It's hardly surprising considering that they both needed them during the Cold War.
As I said - this might be true from a high level political perspective - it certainly was not the motivation that drove the individual soldiers. US soldiers certainly treated German citizens much better than German soldiers treated the population in Poland or Russia.

Also, I know of many hundreds of thousands of German soldiers who would disagree with your caveat, had they survived the gulags.
Yes - hundreds of thousands of German soldiers died as POWs of the Soviet Union.
Soldiers of a country that absolutely devastated the Soviet Union killing millions of civilians. Soldiers of a country that let millions of Soviet POWs die in their camps.

A million dead POWs is a terrible number, and behind each of them there is an individual fate with a grieving family (my grandfather also died in Russia) - considering what Germany did during the war to the later victors, it still seems that Germany was pretty well off after the war - even under Soviet occupation (much much more so under the Western Allies).

Comparing the unprovoked systematic murder of millions of civilians with the death of one third of the German POWs in the SU after a war that destroyed the country is indeed shameful.